I'm a tech writer and SharePoint administrator and content developer. I have about five years experience with lists, libraries, site building, user admin and so on. I'm in a Professional Services type of company providing enterprise-level software services in the HR space.

I'm not a programmer and don't have coding skills beyond HTML nor do I expect to have a lot of support from a developer so wil have to accomplish these tasks using standard product features, list types, and so on. It's not actually a very complex scenario at this point so I think it should be possible.

I have a new contract which requires re-building a documentation suite which has been created using SharePoint 2010. The documentation itself is OK but the SharePoint techniques are not. Basically everything has been deployed to a series of libraries each of which contains folders, subfolders and links to other libraries. It is very hard to navigate and maintain.

I intend to replace the folders by using metadata and tagging to label all the documents, with a high-level tag like Project Management, a 2nd level tag for like, Initation, Execution, Maintenance, and a 3rd level tag for document type, like Blueprint, Presentation, etc.

This will enable me to display the document library in nested and sorted lists rather than a maze of linked folders.

Here is one of my initial questions: I'm a bit unclear on the link between Document Meta-data (i.e. the content of particular fields associated with MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents) and the corresponding fields in SharePoint. Say if I create a custom SharePoint field for Document Category, with a drop down list comprising a menu choice, can this value (say, Project Management) be inherited by that document template when it is downloaded by the end user?

>  link between Document Meta-data ... and the corresponding fields in SharePoint.

Yes, it's automatic and is displayed from Word or Excel's File/Info/Properties/Show Document Panel.

Also, the Document Information Panel can be customized from within SharePoint using InfoPath from Library Settings, Information Policy Settings. You could create custom validation, lookups, etc.